


What Am I To You?

by AubreyPosenEsquire



Series: Random AU's [5]
Category: Pitch Perfect (Movies)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:54:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27688579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AubreyPosenEsquire/pseuds/AubreyPosenEsquire
Summary: Stacie Conrad doesn’t do complicated. Aubrey Posen can’t help to be anything but. Yet they are drawn together.
Relationships: Stacie Conrad/Aubrey Posen
Series: Random AU's [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1971802
Comments: 6
Kudos: 55





	What Am I To You?

**Author's Note:**

> This idea sprang to mind and I had to do it. 
> 
> Thanks G, for beta-ing.

The Lodge at Fallen Leaves was a forty-five minute drive from the Barden campus because you had to go halfway around the lake to get there.

Every time Stacie Conrad packed a weekend bag and made the trip she cursed herself for it. This thing between her and Aubrey was complicated. The nature of sleeping together when they weren’t publicly any more than former Bella teammates complicated things on its face. They had the same friends, they shared so much of the same history with each other over the last four years, they both wanted to make their father’s proud of who they had become as adults but couldn’t. Her father was a ghost and Aubrey’s ghosted her.

Stacie Conrad doesn’t do complicated relationships. She didn’t really do relationships at all. Between her chemical engineering major with her 3.97 GPA, the Bellas and making sure to keep up on the social events on campus she didn’t have time for more than a night - two if the person is partially skilled - before her attention is diverted to the next challenge.

Aubrey Posen is about as complicated as a person can be. A delightful - and sometimes not to delightful - display of contradictions. Like the color blue; the hottest part of the flame but used to represent the coldest temperatures. She was like a sun shower when the rain poured down as the sun shone from above. 

Stacie Conrad didn’t do complicated and Aubrey Posen couldn’t help being anything but. 

Sitting at a red light - half way to Aubrey’s and half way from the woman she was when she was at Barden - she lit a cigarette. It was a bad habit and she knew it. 

Aubrey dressed her down for a full half hour when she caught Stacie smoking her freshman year. It was just after a stressful practice when Stacie took a door the rest of them didn’t usually go out of. She headed to the designated smoking area and lit up. Aubrey was there sixty seconds later telling her it was bad for her voice. She started listing off the effects of smoking like a bad 90’s PSA. Stacie didn’t have the heart to tell her she mostly lit them up because the scent reminded her of her father. She usually only puffed a few times on it to keep it going as she gathered her thoughts. 

Stacie puffed in as the light turned green. Her car seemed to be driving her to Aubrey’s without her having to do all that much to get her there. She had been making this drive almost weekly for almost five months now. She didn’t tell the others where she was going and none of them asked. She wasn’t sure if one of them figured it out and right now she couldn’t find it in herself to care. 

Not when she thought tonight might be the very last time she was going to drive around the lake between the Lodge and Barden. She was graduating soon, she had finals, the Bellas had Worlds, she and Aubrey didn’t have a future. 

Their relationship might have been complicated but Stacie didn’t think their ending would be. 

As she rolled her window down she thought about how much she would miss the moments they shared once she was in Cambridge and Aubrey was a thousand miles away. 

She would miss deeply the feeling of joy she felt every time Aubrey put on an old record on her grandfather’s record player. They would slow dance in the tiny living room, usually a few glasses of wine in, before one or the other would break the dance to pull the other to bed. Sometimes in her weaker moments, Stacie felt herself believe in the magic Chloe always talked about when she talked about love and fate and soulmates when she saw the way Aubrey bit her lip and tugged her to bed. 

She would miss the feeling of Aubrey tucking herself in her arms after they spent the better part of her first night remembering each other. Hungry kisses and wandering hands, a pull as though by a force outside the pair’s control bringing them together, the comfort of knowing how to make sure the other felt bliss. 

She would miss Saturday mornings the most. The feeling of slowly waking up with someone who so rarely took time to do so. The way Aubrey lightened like the weight that she lived under constantly had no place in her life for the morning always left Stacie trying to catch her breath at the magnificence of it. The breakfast Aubrey would make her - usually just wearing a white Oxford button down after an errant comment by her once about how good Aubrey looked in that style of shirt wearing nothing else - didn’t spoil the mood either. 

When Stacie pulled her car next to Aubrey’s she paused before cutting the engine and getting out.

Stacie Conrad doesn’t do complicated relationships but she had been doing one for the better part of five months without giving it a label. When she and Aubrey parted they wouldn’t be ex girlfriends. They wouldn’t be ex friends because she couldn’t see a world where either of them set themselves apart from the Bellas that meant so much to both of them. They would be an ex future that they couldn’t have because it was too complicated to try to do long distance with the future Stacie wanted and Aubrey was building at the Lodge.

When Aubrey opened the door she rolled her eyes at the lingering smell of smoke on Stacie before leaning up to kiss her jaw. 

“I bought a bottle of wine a few days ago that I think you’re really going to like.” Aubrey took the weekend bag from Stacie, pulling back from her to go set it in her bedroom like she always did. 

“Oh yeah?” Stacie called as she took her jacket off. 

The living room had a few candles lit and the blinds partly opened to let the afternoon light do the work to set the room in a golden glow. There was a roast in the oven by the smell of it and a bottle of red wine breathing on the small island in the kitchen with two glasses set out to be filled.

Stacie stepped closer to make sure the bottle of wine was the one she thought it was. The wine was a multi hundred dollar bottle that Stacie once told Aubrey she wanted to buy and drink it if she ever had the money to do it. And now it was standing uncorked in Aubrey’s kitchen. 

Aubrey returned from depositing Stacie’s bag in the bedroom when she saw the brunette standing in her kitchen looking at the bottle of wine. She stepped beside her, shoulder to shoulder, as she turned her head to look at Stacie’s profile. 

“I called in a favor to track down a bottle.” Aubrey’s voice was soft like a rain falling during a summer sun shower. “You seemed to want it and you should have things you want.”

She poured each of them a healthy glass before handing one of them to Stacie, who accepted it having still not processed the bottle was there in the first place.

“It’s an expensive bottle of wine, Aubrey.” Stacie swirled the crimson liquid in her glass before lifting it up to take a taste. The scent was fantastic and it tasted better still. 

“Tonight is kind of a big night.” Aubrey bit her lip and set the glass down without having taken a drink from it. “Will you sit down in the living room? Please?”

Stacie took her wine. Tonight had suddenly gotten more complicated. She sat on the couch, crossing one leg over the other as she waited for Aubrey to join her. 

Aubrey came in holding a plain white envelope in her slightly shaky hands. 

“The last five months has been incredible.” Aubrey gave an apprehensive smile as she looked at Stacie, the coffee table between them. “I haven’t been with someone who makes me feel like you do, Stacie. I feel brave because of you. I feel like the pressures that I put on myself might not all belong on my shoulders all the time. You are this accomplished, beautiful, charming, sexy woman who had made me reassess everything that I thought I couldn’t do. So I did something that I thought I’d never do.”

Inside the envelope Stacie pulled out an acceptance letter in Aubrey’s name to the Boston University School of Law. 

“Aubrey.” Stacie felt the breath leaving her lungs. 

“About a month ago I got an offer from a company to buy the Lodge. A really generous offer. Really generous. And I thought about what I wanted out of my life, who I wanted to be at the end of the day. And who I wanted to end that day with.” Aubrey played with her fingers as she spoke, a sure sign she was nervous. “We’ve only been dating for five months but I'm falling in love with you. Because you know the bad parts of me, the angry parts of me, the broken parts and you accept them as part of the package as much as you do the goofy parts and the fun parts and the sexy parts.”

Stacie felt her hands shake as she looked up at Aubrey. 

She had a choice to make.

Did she break Aubrey’s heart in her tiny apartment in Georgia or in some distant place in the future when she inevitably failed her? 

“You love me?”

Aubrey felt a few tears slip down her cheeks as she let out a short laugh. “I really, really do. I mean how could anyway you’re seeing now fall in love with you. You’re impressive, Stacie.” She moved around the coffee table to sit down next to her.

The words “seeing” as in “seeing each other and not other people” cut bone deep. It felt a little like Stacie thought being jabbed with a knife right in between her ribs might feel like. The metal cut into soft flesh that had no defense against it. 

“Aubrey…I…” Stacie took in and let out a breath. “I need to… just let me say this, alright?”

The light that had been so bright in Aubrey’s eyes dimmed a little bit as Stacie spoke and pulled away to stand where Aubrey had been a few moments before. 

“I don’t date people. I go on dates with people. I sleep with who I want and I don’t apologize for it. Because who I’m with is between me and that person at that moment.” Stacie felt like she was defending herself which she hated having to do. “I didn’t think we were dating. At least not the way that you seem to think we were. I was still seeing other people during the week if the mood stuck. Though admittedly it’s been striking a lot less than it did five months ago.” 

Stacie saw the slight shake of Aubrey’s shoulders as her happy tears suddenly took on a much more bittersweet filter. She ached to move around the coffee table but she felt compelled to keep going. 

“I don’t do this, Aubrey. What we’ve been doing, I don’t do. I don’t know how to be someone’s girlfriend, I don’t know how to be the person someone relies on in a relationship. I know how to show up on a Friday and leave on Sunday night. I know how to be charming over dinner and be sinful in bed. I don’t know how to be the girl you take home to meet your parents or take trips to the store to decorate an apartment we share by the Charles River. I don’t know how to let someone take care of me or be the one that takes care of them day in and day out.” Stacie closed her eyes.

Did she break Aubrey’s heart now or did she do that to her years from now after things got so intertwined breaking apart would be as painful as losing her left arm?

“But if the offer is on the table after all I just said? I want to try because I’ve been driving forty-five minutes every Friday for five months. And maybe I fucked us up by not understanding this was more serious than I was treating it when I wasn’t here. But I do care about you Aubrey, so much do I care.” Stacie felt her heart breaking a little as she watched Aubrey’s arms wrap around herself. “Please say something.”

Aubrey looked up at her, full Captain Posen about to dress down Beca Mitchell for messing up their set at semi finals anger in her eyes. And a second later it was gone and replaced with the look of a woman who had been destabilized at a cellular level. 

“You have been sleeping…” Aubrey stood up, taking the glass of wine that Stacie left on the coffee table and downing it in one go. 

“I didn’t know there were rules to what you and I had.” Stacie winced at the tone and the wine being gulped down. 

Aubrey held the glass so tight she thought it might break. “This isn’t your fault. I’m the fool here for thinking this was anything more than a place for you to go on the weekends.” She had the tone back in her voice that she did so often in Stacie's freshman year. Her control barely held as she felt like the world she built was slipping from her grasp. 

“You are more than that, Aubrey.” Stacie whispered, feeling a twist of the knife in her chest. “I didn’t think I was more than a friend you got some extra benefit from. You’re Aubrey Posen, Bellas Captain and you had the Lodge and you always seemed so put together. I didn’t think I mattered to you in the long term, for the plans I know you always lay out so perfectly.”

Aubrey stood up when the alarm on the oven went off. She wiped at her eyes and then smoothed her skirt down before she walked into the kitchen to go check the roast without saying another word. 

Stacie stood in the living room, tilting her head down and trying to keep herself from rushing out of the door or rushing to the bathroom to pull a Posen. She grabbed the empty wine glass after giving Aubrey a few moments to walk it to the kitchen.

When she walked in she saw Aubrey with her hands flat on the counter, head bowed and tears falling into the sink as she shook. 

“Bree.” Stacie whimpered as she moved to wrap her arms around Aubrey from behind, pulling her flush against her. She couldn’t just stand there while Aubrey was crying, not if she had the power to try and fix it in some way. 

“I thought I was enough for you.” Aubrey managed to get out.

“You are.” Stacie pressed a kiss to the side of Aubrey’s neck after sweeping her hair over the opposite shoulder. She gave a small smile at the feeling of Aubrey pressing back just a little against her as her lips pressed to her neck. “I just didn’t know I could have all of you. I didn’t know you wanted all of me.”

“Is that what you want, all of me now that you know the option is there?” Aubrey tried not to get her hopes up even as she felt Stacie’s arms tight around her waist. 

Stacie gave herself a moment to really think about it. Because if it wasn’t what she wanted she needed to tell Aubrey that now. It wasn’t fair to either of them to push forward if there were doubts. Aubrey was prepared to move a thousand miles away from the home she had built in Georgia since she was eighteen for her, it wasn’t something Stacie could take lightly.

“I have never belonged to someone the way I think you want me to belong to you and you want to belong to me.” Stacie rested her chin on Aubrey’s shoulder. “I can’t promise that I won’t be terrible at it, but I want to try. Is that enough for you?”

“You being willing to try is all that I can ask.” Aubrey reached up and pressed her hand to Stacie’s cheek, turning her head to press their cheeks together as she did. 

“Then let’s eat the dinner you prepared for us and we’ll talk. Really talk about all of this. The last five months and Cambridge in the fall and all the rest.” Stacie felt a ball of fear in her belly at the thought of all of the topics that she usually avoided being laid bare in that conversation but she trusted Aubrey to hold her hand through the process. 

“Pour us some more wine and I’ll get everything plated.” Aubrey nudged Stacie back to pull everything out of the oven and get it plated.

Stacie did as Aubrey asked, filling both glasses and bringing them to the table before taking her seat.

“Thank you.” Stacie said when Aubrey handed her a plate. 

“I enjoy cooking for you.” Aubrey admitted as she took her seat. 

Stacie reached across the table, her hand sliding over Aubrey’s. “I will never turn down a meal you cook.”

Aubrey and Stacie both started to eat as they gathered their thoughts of a conversation both knew they needed to have if they were going to go forward as a couple. 

Aubrey - naturally - was the first to speak. 

“I assumed you coming here every weekend meant we were on the same page about what was happening. That wasn’t fair to you.” Aubrey looked up from her plate. 

“Maybe not. But it wasn’t fair of me to assume it wasn’t more than what I’ve had with other people just because we didn’t talk about it.” Stacie countered.

“So what do we do about the last five months? How do we frame it?” Aubrey asked.

“We treat it as proof of concept. You and I spend large amounts of time together and be happy.” Stacie tried to find a framing of their last five months that might make both of them happy. 

“So we move forward with a clean slate?” Aubrey lifted her wine glass to her lips, savoring the wine this time. 

“Clean slate, and we talk with each other about expectations. I should know yours and you should know mine.” Stacie retook Aubrey’s hand, lacing their fingers together.

“Monogamy.” Aubrey couldn’t help herself. “If we date long term, if I am going to be able to do this, Stacie that is at the top of my list.”

Stacie leaned back in her chair. “I haven’t ever had anyone but myself to answer to when it comes to going to bed or not with someone but I’m not incapable of being exclusive if I want to be.” 

“I don’t think you are.” Aubrey squeezed Stacie’s hand firmly. “But for this to work it’s something I need from you. I’m sure you will need things from me in kind.”

Stacie turned back to her dinner as she thought what she was going to need in this relationship to make it work. “I need honesty Aubrey. I need you to tell me what you think and not do the thing where you bottle everything up until you explode. That’s what I need.”

Aubrey stood from the table, scrapping her plate as Stacie’s words rolled around in her head. “I will work to make sure that I am a better communicator.” She turned back to Stacie once she put her dish in the sink. 

Stacie stood, scrapping her plate before reaching around Aubrey to set it in the sink. She leaned in until Aubrey was pressed between the counter and her frame. She bent her head to kiss along Aubrey’s jaw, a faint smile on her lips. 

“Sex.” Stacie whispered. “We’re going to need to have a lot of sex.”

“I don’t foresee that being an issue.” Aubrey brought her left hand up to press to the back of Stacie’s neck. 

Stacie brought both of her arms around Aubrey’s waist, making sure there wasn’t any space between their bodies. She could have spent the rest of the night standing in Aubrey’s kitchen with her lips on Aubrey’s neck but too soon - in her humble opinion - Aubrey nudged her back. 

“Dishes come before what’s on your mind.” Aubrey leaned up to kiss her chastely before turning around to get the dishes started.

Aubrey washed, Stacie dried and put them away. 

The pair grabbed their wine glasses and emptied the bottle refilling them. Aubrey brought them to the couch instead of the bedroom. Much of Stacie’s temporary displeasure. 

“Are we going to be living together in Cambridge?” Aubrey asked, resting an arm on the back of the couch, her head against her hand. 

Stacie bought herself some time to think by taking a sip of her wine. The idea of having Aubrey around day in and day out was appealing. They had never had the chance to live together with Aubrey moving out of Bella House when she moved in. 

“Yeah, I’d like that.” Stacie answered. “The campuses aren’t far from each other, just on the other side of the river really. We can find something close enough to both. Maybe a one bedroom place that we can see the river from.”

“With the sale of the lodge, I have the finances to be able to find us an apartment that is higher end than we might have afforded otherwise.” Aubrey was proud of herself for what she ended up selling the lodge for. “I can cover rent myself.”

“Everything else we’d split 50/50.” Stacie wasn’t going to argue Aubrey paying the rent since she knew her finances would be tight working in the research lab as her income while going to MIT. 

“I’d agree to that.” Aubrey smiled.

Stacie set down her wine glass, her hand resting on the back of the couch, her fingers just able to press against Aubrey’s arm. “I’m sure there are more things we need to talk about but how about tonight you put on an old record and we treat the rest of tonight just like any other Friday night? We dance and you take me to bed and tomorrow you make breakfast in my favorite shirt you own.”

“That shirt is going to be making the move with us.” Aubrey felt her cheeks heat up. 

“It better.” Stacie leaned forward to give Aubrey a soft kiss. 

Aubrey lifted her head to make it a bit easier to kiss Stacie. She really did love the feeling of how focused Stacie was when they kissed. “I like dancing with you in our bare feet in the living room.”

“I promise we’ll still do that in Cambridge.” Stacie promised with an easy grin. The more she thought of having Aubrey Posen all to herself the less scary the idea felt and the more she felt like a fool for ever thinking they weren’t something real. 

“I can’t believe you’re going to MIT.” Aubrey felt the pride she always did in Stacie well to the surface. 

“A lawyer and a scientist. What a pair we’ll be.” Stacie moved back so Aubrey could get up to pick an album.

Aubrey moved away from the couch to look over her record collection. She had a mix of new and old, more modern and classics that once belonged to her grandfather. She searched for the one she thought was perfect for the moment. 

Aubrey grabbed a record that was only about fifteen years old. She turned when the music started, holding her hand out to Stacie who smiled as Nora Jones’ "What Am I To You?” started to play. 

Stacie pulled Aubrey in her arms once they were close enough for her to reach out and tug Aubrey close. Aubrey’s arms around Stacie’s neck as Stacie’s arms wrapped around Aubrey’s waist. The pair held close to each other as the words wrapped around them as they swayed with each other. 

“What am I to you?” Aubrey whispered. 

“Simple. You’re mine.”

Aubrey rewarded Stacie with a kiss before tugging her back towards her bedroom. 

  
  



End file.
